A typical telephony subscriber installs a plurality of telephones in his or her household. For example, s/he may install telephones in various rooms of the household to enable easy reach of the telephone in the case s/he or other members of the household need to answer an incoming call or need to make an outgoing call irrespective of their location within the household. Typically, no matter how many telephones the subscriber has installed in the household, they are all associated with a single telephone number and a single telephone line that the subscriber subscribes to and pays for. Within a typical household, some members of the household are more likely to effect their voice communications in a certain part of the household. For example, a member of the household who runs her home-based business is more likely to handle her business-related voice communications from a home office phone. A teenager is more likely to effect his voice communications from his bedroom.
Effectively managing incoming calls can be a challenge, especially in a household with more than two members, as the number of incoming calls usually increases with the number of household members. Service providers have made several attempts to rectify the problem. One prior art solution involves displaying Caller Line ID (CLID) information associated with a calling party on a CLID-enabled display of one or more telephones installed in the household. The CLID information is meant to enable the subscriber (or another member of the household) to screen the incoming call to (a) decide how to dispose of the incoming call (ex. answer the incoming call, ignore the incoming call, etc.) and (b) attempt to determine which member of the household the incoming call is destined for. Another prior art solution is commonly referred to as “distinctive ringing”. Within the feature, the subscriber (or other members of the household) can provision his or her telephone number with a list of priority callers. When an incoming call is originated by one of these priority callers, the incoming call is announced with distinctive ringing to signify that the caller who originated the incoming call is one of the priority callers.
These prior art solutions still suffer from certain shortcomings and still may cause inconvenience to the subscriber (or other members of the household). For example, with the CLID announcement feature, the following shortcoming has been identified. Unless each of the telephones within the household is equipped with the CUD-enabled display, when an incoming call is announced at the household, the subscriber (or other members of the household) would have to run to those telephones that are equipped with the CLID-enabled display to ascertain who the originator of the incoming call is. On the other hand, the problem with the distinctive ringing solution is that it is provisioned on a per-telephone-number basis. Accordingly, in those households where multiple members of the household reside, a single list of priority callers that all members of the household agree on has to be provisioned. Within this scenario, the distinctive ringing feature may very quickly lose its meaning, as members of the household will no longer be able to ascertain whether a particular originator of a particular incoming call is “their” priority caller or not.
Therefore, there remains a need for more effective means for managing incoming calls.